China to build plant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

The former violator turns to global leader for green environment, China is building a plant to reduce greenhouse emissions.

As one of the world’s largest countries, Beijing is also one of the world’s largest producers of greenhouse or planet-warming emissions.

Brave New Climate

For a long time now, China is now leading the fight against climate change. The most recent is a plan to open eight large-scale, carbon-capture storage facilities, construction on the first of which is already underway.

The Yanchang Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage Project, located in the Shaanxi Province, will be China’s first investment in a facility that turns carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from coal into gas fuel plants.

According to report, once fully operational, it would capture about 400,00 to 800,000 tons of CO2 every year, says AFR Weekend.

If you look into it, the project is about the same reduction that could be expected by taking 80,000 cars off the streets for a year.

“It’s one of eight large-scale CCS projects — in varying stages of evaluation and subject to approval — that China is considering,” Tony Zhang, a senior adviser in Australia-based Global CCS Institute, told the Digital Journal.

Global CCS is a non-profit institute provided China with technical and advisory support on the project.

Earlier this month, carbon-capture and storage (CCS) technology has recently been in the headlines, with the opening of the world’s first commercial carbon capture plant in Switzerland.

Also, a similar facility is expected to go live later this year in Houston, Texas. This approach to solving the climate problem attempts to make fossil fuel-based plants cleaner.

It’s not the only proposed solution out there, though: recently, there has been a surge in renewable energy sources, as evidence by the growing reliance on solar and wind in a number of countries.

These are also becoming a more economic solution in many parts of the world, as well as providing a wealth of job opportunities. CCS plants, on the other hand, may prove to be too costly for some countries.

Furthermore, aside from its investment in CCS, the country is also working on increasing its renewable energy sources — it’s already the world’s largest producer of solar energy — as well as using more electric vehicles in a number of its cities.

According to a forecast by the country’s National Energy Administration, China is looking to decrease its CO2 emissions from 2016 to about one percent this year.